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BY SELECTIVELY IGNORING inconvenient facts, policy expert Gerald Knaus put forward the 2016 E.U. deal with Turkey as a model for migration policy and the only way to both save the U.N. Refugee Convention and contain populist forces in Europe. Knaus, the founding director of the European Stability Initiative, recently offered this so-called realist model as a solution to the high numbers of asylum seekers and…

Electoral failures of the Cristian Democratic Party (CDU) and Merkel in Germany have been credited extensively to her refugee policy. Equally, the Bratislava and Vienna summits have pushed again the refugee crisis on the forefront of EU diplomatic brinkmanship. In this context, Greece is set to be affected, yet again, more than any other…

Today had been declared the first day that migrants and refugees would be deported from Greece within the framework of the EU-Turkey deal, and European authorities seemed determined not to miss the date. So as of Sunday, Greek police, along with the EU border agency Frontex, organised a large-scale operation to ensure the smooth handling…

German chancellor Angela Merkel has trumpeted the agreement to return Syrian refugees to Turkey from Greece as a “European solution.” But with no real accord across the 28 member states, terms and conditions that will be difficult to put into practice and continuing arrivals to Greece, is it truly a breakthrough? Turkey and the European…

A coalition of the inhumane is rising in Europe. A group of political leaders have been meeting this week in Vienna to coordinate how to seal the western Balkan refugee passage. The Western Balkan countries involved don’t want to risk hosting thousands of stranded people in their poor societies. They expect that by intentionally causing…

Word is going around European media that EU leaders are preparing to cut off Greece from Schengen unless it accepts their plan on how to deal with the refugee crisis, and an operation by the European border agency, Frontex, to control its borders. If a report in the Financial Times is to be believed,…

Jean-Claude Juncker knows how to talk the talk. The keynote of his state of the union address in Strasbourg on Tuesday was compassion: “We can build walls and we can build fences,” the president of the European commission appealed, “but imagine if it were you, your child in your arms, the world you knew torn…